Welcome to Hogwarts – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

**Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone** (Argonaut/EA, PlayStation, 2001)

I can’t ignore the fact that this game is based on the work of an author whose energy is now significantly focused on a hate campaign against a demonised minority. And I have five more such games to come. I never owned this book, but I once bought a box set of movies including it, and recently paid for a copy of the game. I’ve donated the total I’ve paid for Philosopher’s Stone media to a British charity supporting trans people as some kind of offset to another post increasing the reach, by however little, of a series by a leading transphobe.

I was the same age as Harry Potter for a while. Each of the first four books were released while I was in the same school year as Harry and classmates were within them, although I didn’t read any until the third was out. However, like the similarly-timed Pokémon, I was a couple of years too old to be fully in the midst of the Harry Potter phenomenon. I was entertained enough by all of the books but they weren’t my favourites. I would like to say it’s because I recoiled at the reactionary mind-set behind them, but it wasn’t. I’d barely even gone off Piers Anthony’s Xanth series by then, after all. Yet I did always feel that there was an element of Harry Potter that was insulting my intelligence.

It was there in how all of the children seemed to act a couple of years younger than they were, but It was most obvious in the all-too-apparent etymology of so many of the names. The antagonist with the birth name of Dragon Badfoy, the guy who had become a werewolf being called Wolf-raised Wolf, and so on. The idea that so much should be exactly as it appears on the surface left me feeling cheated.

Looking back at the books now, similar things take on a different significance. The Hogwarts system of Houses at the centre of the books has a millinery authority assign children to one of a set number of groups on arrival, and they remain defined by those assignments for the rest of their time, locked off from access to the spaces of those in other groups. If you attend Hogwarts you are a brave child, a clever child, a sly child or a misc child, and that’s that: the four characters. That’s just the way things are. There can be twists to how characters act but they can’t escape the framework. The books are full of the same inflexible and incurious appeals to simplicity and order as JK Rowling’s transphobic arguments.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the mega-selling PlayStation game which I’m going to call Harry Potter PS1 for short, makes just as big a thing of collecting house points for Gryffindor as you might expect from a video game working within its medium’s own established framework. Games still hadn’t quite escaped the high score, though others were trying. It gives you plenty of chances to face off against Draco Malfoy, too, and includes a lot of attributing bad things to unnamed mean members of Slytherin House. Considering it was released to coincide with a film that spent the past part of three hours replicating the book as closely as possible, though, Harry Potter PS1 is remarkably light on the plot specifics of its source material.

Many of the most famous bits of the book (and therefore film) are rushed past in a text-heavy intro. The Hogwarts Express doesn’t get a look in. There is a hilariously accordioned bit where Professor McGonagall sees Harry chasing Draco on a broomstick, appraises him of the possibilities of his flying skills, and then tells him that his first quidditch match is just about to start. What were Team Gryffindor planning before he turned up?? Never mind, though, there are other priorities.

What EA and Argonaut (of Star Wing fame and of Croc… of Croc) decided was that rather than producing a game of the movie/book, producing a game in its world was a much better idea. Harry Potter PS1 gives you chances to interact with Ron and Hermione and Neville and all the gang, rendered in terrifying flat-faced detail, and it eventually comes to a similar confrontational climax to the book, but the main character in it is really Hogwarts. It drops you into the castle as soon as possible, with a bunch of mostly-locked doors, and lives on the promise of exploring it all. It’s an enticing promise.

The exploration plays out through a 3D action adventure. The game leads you on a linear path to seeing more and more of the castle and grounds, interspersed with mini-games and carefully judged bits of further freedom. You pick up abilities as you go which open new areas to you, in the form of various spells which let you do thoroughly video-gamey things like push boxes around (flipendo!) and light up secret platforms (verdimillious!). New abilities are introduced through musical bits where you have to press a sequence of buttons in the correct order. Harry Potter doesn’t have a jump button, but he will automatically jump at the edges of platforms, letting you still do some platforming. There is a lot of messing around with levers that raise platforms or open things up, and there are rooms where you get locked in until you have defeated their enemies. An owl occasionally drops by to provide guidance on where to go next. It may all sound a bit familiar.

I was expecting Harry Potter PS1 to focus on trying to fit as much of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone as possible into a game. But that’s not its game. It’s closer to being how to best introduce the world of Harry Potter in a video game form, but it isn’t quite that either. Given the popularity of Harry Potter, it doesn’t need to make introductions in that direction. Instead, its driving force appears to be how to best use Harry Potter to introduce children to a particular type of video game. Its biggest aspiration isn’t anything Harry Potter at all, but to be a set of training wheels for Ocarina of Time.

Harry Potter PS1 rarely gives you the opportunity to get confused. You pretty much just get one action button in any situation, with the opportunity to do different spells indicated by different colour sparks and a press of X doing whatever is appropriate. It has easily gathered collectibles everywhere in a way that even outpaces Spyro the Dragon. Its puzzle boss fights mostly consist of realising the one thing you are able to do. It is all very straightforward, but it keeps the discoveries and novelties coming at a quick pace, in a way which resembles the straightforward readability of the first book.

The exploration never quite lives up to the enticing possibility, but I didn’t feel cheated. Checking out all of the different locations in a big building is a timeless video game pursuit, going back to Jet Set Willy and beyond, for good reason. Harry Potter PS1’s limitations feel like they come from both pragmatism and deliberate positioning. If it persuaded a few children to just get into Zelda instead, it’s very hard to see that as a negative.